Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Quarter-pounders with guilt

issue 11 August 2012

The McDonald’s in the Olympic Park has 1,500 seats and is the biggest McDonald’s on earth. Let us ignore the cognitive dissonance of McDonald’s sponsoring the Olympics because we have screamed about that. Let us forget other complaints about the Olympics because, with many golds won by Team GB (an acronym that comes with its own nationalist resurgence and exclamation mark), there is obviously no better way to spend our GNP than on making people run around in circles very fast. Except this is a very self-hating McDonald’s which seems entirely in denial about being a McDonald’s. It could even, apart from the golden arches and the uniforms and the menu, be a secret McDonald’s in disguise, home to a gaggle of French resistance fighters, or al-Qa’eda, or yogis.

The Olympic Park is a concrete nightmare with vast skies.

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